This year’s November 7th passed in Ukraine almost unnoticed. Just another day in late autumn – short, dark and dull. That’s not what the Communist party leaders hoped for when they celebrated the 50th anniversary of the “Great October Socialist Revolution” (that was the official name) fifty years ago. I remember 1967 very well. General euphoria flooded the three existing television channels and all the paper media were crammed with “reports” about the achievements of the working people and working intelligentsia on the “labor fronts.” There was no end to all sorts of functions and meetings, to congratulatory telegrams sent by leaders of “brotherly” parties from all over the world. My fellow student said to me then, “Can you imagine what it will be like when the centenary of the Revolution is celebrated?” However, there was nothing on November 7, 2017… Just another November day, dark and boring…
Political experts and analysts have written volumes about the collapse of the Soviet Union, emphasizing various reasons why the implementation of the communist ideology failed. All of them may be right. I am just going to present a layman’s arguments why I am strongly against this ideological experiment to be repeated now or any time in the future.
At first sight, I don’t have much to complain about. I grew in a family in which there were three more children. When our father died, two of the children were still in high school (my brother, who was three years younger, and I were already university students). Our mother, being the only bread-winner in the family with a rather small salary – just enough only to make both ends meet, managed to raise the younger ones and they also graduated from universities. I received what I consider to be good education and I felt (and continue to feel 🙂 ) quite comfortable in such areas as pedagogy and foreign languages. Later, when I met American and British educationalist, and then when I taught at schools of Sheffield and Chicago, I saw for myself that my level was not lower than that of my colleagues in Britain or the U.S.A. At the start of my career, I was “given” an apartment to live in. In those days apartments were not bought – they were “given” for free by the administration at your place of work if they thought that you were an efficient and perspective employee, i.e. if you “deserved” this benefit. Apartments became immediately the property of those to whom they were given, and no one could take them away from you, even if you changed your place of work and started working for another enterprise, or even if you went to another city to work.
When I began working after the university, I could afford to buy good books. I collected an excellent home library which contained the best works of world classical literature. My own children were basking in the atmosphere of books and music. When they were little kids, my wife and I used to take them to the seaside either in the Crimea or the Caucasus practically every summer.
No unemployment, residence given for free (and used in perpetuity), free education, free medicine, the motto “A man is a brother (not a wolf) to another man…” Why, then, am I AGAINST that communist experiment?
In the first place, it’s because not everything was free… You could openly say only what the Big Brother expected you to say. I had to be cautious when I was teaching classes. In one of her lectures, in the 1970s, one of my colleagues mentioned (in passing) that millions of people had been murdered on Josef Stalin’s orders. She was reported by an anonymous informer and kicked out from the university within a couple of days.
Earlier I mentioned my home library: John Steinbeck, Harper Lee, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, William Golding, Dylan Thomas, Muriel Spark… Their works were (and are now) on my shelves at arm’s length. But to possess such books as The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn meant much trouble if the possession was discovered. And should the owner give The Gulag Archipelago to a friend to read, that could lead to an arrest and imprisonment of the giver because such an action came under the provision of the law about anti-Soviet propaganda. Myself, I was able to read Solzhenitsyn’s work only in the United States. Earlier, in Britain, I read George Orwell’s 1984 and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago, which were also banned in the Soviet Union.
All schools, factories, farms (there were only “collective” farms), all enterprises, offices – no matter how small they could be – each had their “party bureaus” which kept a watchful eye on the behavior of their employees. If anyone (even not a Communist party member) stepped back from the “party line,” repercussions followed right away. In my time there were no mass arrests, as they were in the 1930s, but dismissal from work was common. There were expulsions of students from universities too. One of our students who knew English best was sent to Alma-Ata (the then capital of the Kazakh Republic in Central Asia) to participate in an all-U.S.S.R. English competition. There he told (in private, with only a few people present) a “political joke.” A week or two after his return from Alma-Ata, the local KGB informed the university rector about the “disloyalty” of the student. He was saved from expulsion only because he was in his last year of the university and was already assigned to a certain place to work after graduation.
Incidentally, placements after graduation were another headache for most of the students. The graduates had to work where the educational authorities sent them to – even if the students had found better places of work which were more to their liking and where they were welcomed. Places for students in the first 2-3 years of graduation were in remote (“God-forsaken”) villages, hardly accessible in late fall or winter time, and with very limited number of conveniences.
Travelling abroad was a privilege of the few who were chosen. Again, such trips had to be approved beforehand by a party bureau or a party committee, which supervised subordinated party bureaus. If any stepping back or away “from the line” was revealed before the trip, the candidate was barred from travelling. The same took place when a person returned from a trip abroad with “tarnished reputation” (usually it became known also from anonymous reports). Then, violators were blacklisted and banned from future trips. Another colleague of mine bought a crucifix (a small, next-to-skin baptismal cross) while being on a tour in Bulgaria. A few days after his return, there was a phone call from the regional party committee, followed by a staff meeting where the colleague’s behavior was discussed, and only because he was not a communist party member, the punishment was mild – just a reprimand registered in his work record book.
As regards religion, officially it was not banned, but by default (a popular word in our computer age), it was frowned upon. Scientific Atheism was a required course at all departments in all universities. My mother was a Baptist believer, and I was reticent about it knowing that I would hardly be allowed to work were I was working if the administration found it out.
As a child, I listened to what my parents told me about their childhood. In the 1930s, my grandparents (both on the paternal and maternal lines) had been dispossessed of their land and evicted from their homes just because they were a bit more successful than most other villagers, i.e. they had a few more horses or oxen, their houses were more spacious, etc. After the eviction and their property – even their kitchen utensils – taken from them, they had to go and live at other people’s homes – as a rule, with their distant relatives. And since the relatives could not physically accept the whole family in their houses, the parents lived at one place and the children at another, sometimes in another village. My father’s father was arrested for being “rich” but managed to escape, and lived secretly in another part of the country.
And then, there was so much of deception and lying behind pompous phrases and speeches from TV screens and rostrums. The party bureaucrats, unable to work the command economy, which they called “planned economy”, generated continuous shortages of food, clothes, services, etc. They tried to calm the people by their “skoro budet” (“it’s coming soon”) slogans. However, they did not tighten their own belts. They had special shops (including food shops) which had all sorts of goods inaccessible to “lesser mortals”, special clinics and hospitals for themselves, right connections… Only one telephone call from a local party boss was enough to solve any issue — even if “to solve” meant to break the law. That was called the “telephone right.” In case with higher education, the telephone right was used, for example, to secure the admission of their sons, daughters and other relatives, or just those from their own clan, to universities, though in most cases young people who were admitted this way didn’t match the admission standards.
I have cast a glance at the latest stage of communism in my country, as I experienced it myself. I could write hundreds of more pages with thousands of examples about why I cannot accept that ideology. It looks human only on the surface – free education, free medicine, “homo homini frater est,” etc., etc. It is inhuman — basically and fundamentally.
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Today, on November 11, at 11 o’clock in the morning, flowers were laid at the Cenotaph in London, as they are traditionally laid annually on this day to remember Britain’s war dead.
IGNORANT
TO BE